The Forest (72 page)

The church was coming in sight when the vicar casually remarked: ‘I noticed today, Fanny, when you were being vaccinated, that you are wearing a silver chain round your neck. I have seen you do so before, yet upon each occasion I have also noticed that whatever hangs from it is hidden under your dress. What is this pendant, I wonder?’

By way of answer, with a smile she pulled it out. ‘It’s nothing to look at,’ she said, ‘so I keep it hidden. But I like to wear it sometimes.’

Gilpin stared at the pendant curiously.

It was a strange little object, a wooden crucifix, quite black with age. Looking carefully, he could just make out some antique carving on it; but of what kind or what date it was impossible to say. Whatever kind the carving was, the pendant was a simple wooden cross and the vicar approved of it. ‘You performed a Christian act this morning,’ he said warmly, ‘and I am equally glad to see that you choose to wear this simple cross – for you must know that to me it is worth far more than any gold or silver ornament.’ She could not help blushing for pleasure at such praise. ‘But tell me, Fanny,’ he continued, ‘where does it come from?’

She had only been seven years old at the time, but she remembered it well. Her mother had taken her to the house. She supposed it was in Lymington. She wasn’t sure, but her mother had seemed to be cross about something.

The old lady had been sitting by the fire. She had appeared very old to Fanny – over eighty probably – all wrapped in shawls; but with a comfortable air: a nice, friendly old face and very bright blue eyes.

‘Bring the child here, then, Mary,’ she had told Fanny’s mother. There had been a trace of impatience in her voice. ‘Do you know who I am, child?’ she had asked.

‘No.’ Fanny had no idea. She saw the old woman glance at her mother and shake her head.

‘I’m your grandmother, child.’

‘My grandmother!’ She had felt a thrill of excitement. She had never met such a person before. Her father had been so old when he married that his own mother had died well before Fanny’s birth. As for her mother, she had always supposed it was the same. She turned to her now. ‘You never told me I had a grandmother,’ she said reproachfully.

‘Well, you have!’ the old lady exclaimed sharply.

They had had a lovely talk after that. Fanny couldn’t remember much of what they said. Her grandmother had spoken of the past and her own parents, and other family long departed. Their names had meant nothing to Fanny, but she had taken away a vague but unforgettable impression of sea breezes, ships, vague adventure: as though she had opened a hidden window and seen, smelled, tasted a world she had never known before – and never would again, for she was not taken to see the old lady any more. The woodland world of Albion House had enclosed her for many years after that. The house at Lymington and her long-lost grandmother had receded into her memory like a single childhood day, spent by the sea.

Only one tangible evidence of that meeting remained. Just before they left, her grandmother had taken the little wooden cross from around her neck and given it to her. ‘This is for you, child,’ she said, ‘to remember your grandmother. My mother gave it to me and it had been in her family for I don’t know how long. Since before the Spanish Armada, they say.’ She had taken her hand. ‘Now if I give you this, will you promise to keep it?’

‘Yes, Grandmother,’ she had said. ‘I promise.’

‘Good. Now give your old grandmother, whom you never saw before, a kiss.’

‘I shall come again, now I know you, and you must come to see us,’ Fanny had said happily.

‘Just you keep that cross,’ the old lady replied.

She had been very surprised by how angry her mother had been when they got out into the street again. ‘Fancy giving a child that dirty old thing,’ she had exclaimed, looking at the little cross with disgust. ‘We’ll throw it away as soon as we get home.’

‘No!’ Fanny had cried, with unexpected passion. ‘It’s mine. My grandmother gave it me. I promised to keep it. I promised.’

She had hidden the cross, so that no one should steal it. A year later her mother had died. As for her grandmother, she supposed she must have died too. There was no more mention of her at Albion House. But she had always kept the cross.

‘And who was your grandmother?’ Gilpin now enquired.

‘My mother was a Miss Totton, as you know,’ Fanny replied. ‘So she must have been old Mrs Totton. I know she was Mr Totton’s second wife. His first, from whom my Totton cousins descend, was a cousin of the Burrards. So I should imagine she was one of those old Lymington families, connected with the sea.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ agreed Gilpin. ‘One of the Buttons, perhaps.’ He nodded. ‘It’s probably in the Lymington parish register, you know, if they married there.’

‘Why yes. I hadn’t thought about it. I suppose it is.’ She smiled. ‘Would you help me look, one day?’

Dusk: the two figures came independently, from opposite directions. No one would have guessed that they would meet at a prearranged place.

Charles Louis Marie, Comte d’Hector, general, aristocrat, as valiant a man as any of the legendary Three Musketeers, took good care to saunter up the High Street as casually as if he were enjoying an evening stroll. His trusted companion came down a back lane in a similar manner.

The Frenchman was an elegant sight. While most men were now wearing their hair naturally, he and his fellow émigrés wore the short powdered wigs of the French royal court. A silk coat and knee-breeches completed his attire, as though to say: ‘We not only deplore the Revolution in our country; we decline even to recognize its existence.’

Whatever one thought of the old royal regime in France, the French Revolution of 1789 had turned into a desperately bloody affair. The initial experiments in republican democracy had given way to the guillotine, for the aristocracy and the royal family, and more recently, in the awful Terror, to the wholesale execution of thousands accused as enemies of the Revolution. Aristocrats and their followers, like the French community at Lymington, had fled if they could. All Europe had watched, horrified. The continental powers had prepared for war. Nobody knew where this turmoil across the sea might lead. Even in quiet Lymington, which seldom took much notice of anything that did not concern it, the French conflict was made real by the presence of the émigrés in their midst.

There were about a dozen gentlemen like the count in Lymington, several with their families, mostly lodging with the better local tradesmen. There were also three bodies of troops – four hundred soldiers at the town’s small barracks, another four hundred artillerymen at the malt-house in New Street, and a further six hundred men of the French Royal Navy who had been quartered out in the farm buildings near Buckland. The men were, as was only to be expected, a considerable nuisance to the community, but were suffered on account of the gallant officers who led them. The count had caused eight of his men to be soundly whipped at the corner of Church Street the day before to make it clear to the people of Lymington that indiscipline would not be tolerated, and the entire cadre of officers had gone out of their way to make themselves agreeable both to the ladies of the town and to their husbands. For the time being, at least, they were still welcome guests. But the count was under no illusions. Put a foot wrong and life in Lymington could be made very unpleasant.

The packet Grockleton had given him that morning, therefore, had been very frightening indeed. Not the letter from Mrs Grockleton, inviting him and two fellow officers to dinner the following week, but the other message, slipped discreetly inside it by her husband after he had taken it from her. If the message meant what the Frenchman suspected, then it concerned a business that might take very careful handling; and this was why, as a precaution, the count had selected one companion to join him, as a witness, at this evening’s secret rendezvous.

‘I am not yet telling any of the other officers,
mon ami
,’ he had explained. ‘I am only telling you because I can rely not only upon your advice but upon your absolute discretion.’

It was almost dark as he turned off the High Street near the church.

Of all the many inventions English builders had discovered in the last century or so, none was more charming than a particular kind of boundary construction often used in gardens.

The crinkle-crankle wall, they called it. Instead of running in a straight line like an ordinary brick wall, it was wavy, curving back and forth like a series of love seats. Most often these walls were to be found in the counties of East Anglia; but for some reason – perhaps an East Anglian builder had come to dwell in the town – there were a number in Lymington. They were mostly built quite high: some you could just look over, some not. The curves were big enough, usually, for a couple of men to stand in so that, if you were looking along the wall, you would not see them. And it was for precisely this reason that Samuel Grockleton had asked the French count to come at dusk, down the lane behind his garden, which was bounded by a crinkle-crankle wall.

Grockleton waited quietly until he heard the light tap, made with a coin, on the other side. He had scraped away some of the mortar on the outside of the wall between two of the bricks. When he pulled a brick out from his side, there was a neat little slit through which one could talk. He tapped the place, then spoke. ‘Is that you, Count?’

‘Yes,
mon ami
. I came as you asked.’

‘Were you followed?’

‘No.’

‘This precaution is necessary. Did you know that my house is watched?’

‘It does not surprise me. It is natural, given your position.’

‘Even when you come to dinner, I cannot risk being seen in private conversation with you. Tongues would wag.’

‘I do not doubt it.’

‘Quite. I am instructed to say, Count, that His Britannic Majesty’s government has need of your help.’ This was not quite true. No one had actually instructed him to say so because, knowing only too well the inefficiency, and quite likely the corruption, of official channels, Grockleton had decided to act on his own initiative without official approval. Of course, if he succeeded they
would
approve, so it all came to the same thing.

‘My dear friend, I am at your government’s service.’

‘Then let me tell you, Count,’ he began, ‘exactly what I need.’

It was not only, as both men knew, a question of smuggling brandy and other goods. As well as the huge illicit trade there was traffic in gold and in information. The patriotism of a later age was not much developed yet and certainly not along the southern coast. British naval officers fought in the hope of prize money from captured ships; their men fought because they had been kidnapped by the press gangs and taken to sea. Even a commander as loved as Nelson dared not let his men ashore at an English port – for if he did, he’d never see most of them again. So would the smugglers of southern England buy brandy, trade gold, sell information to their country’s enemies? They would. They did.

But above all, for the dwellers by the New Forest coast, it was a question of simple trade in contraband. And they were so well organized, in such large bands, that not all the riding officers together could have stopped one of their great night-time caravans. In order to do that you needed troops.

It had been tried. Detachments of dragoons and other regiments had been quartered at Lymington from time to time. There were plans for building a new barracks over at Christchurch. The cavalry were never locally recruited, of course; that would be useless. But even so, they were not always keen to take on the smuggling bands. In the last ten years there had been two pitched battles. On each occasion a number of troopers had been killed. And since the troopers were in sympathy with the smugglers anyway, it was not a popular assignment.

‘My chances of intercepting contraband with English troops’, Grockleton informed the Frenchman, ‘are not good.’

But what about French troops? The idea had come to him a week ago and it might turn out to be a stroke of genius. The French troops had no local ties, no sympathies with the smugglers, nothing. They were bored, looking for something to do. There were, altogether, more than a thousand of them. And they were only there on the sufferance of the British government. If he could make a major interception using them it would not only earn him the grateful thanks of the government; his share of the confiscated loot would make him a modest fortune. He might be unpopular but he could probably retire.

If, on the other hand, the Frenchman failed to support him he could let it be known in London at once. The king himself would hear and be seriously displeased.

All of this, without needing to be told, the Frenchman perfectly understood. ‘It will have to be done with total secrecy,’ he replied when he had heard Grockleton’s plan.

‘Certainly.’

‘I dare not tell my men even upon the day. A parade, some excuse to assemble under arms will be needed, and then …’

‘My feelings exactly. I may have your co-operation, then?’

‘Totally. It goes without saying. I am His Britannic Majesty’s to command.’

‘Then, Sir, I thank you,’ said Grockleton and pushed his brick back into place.

For a moment or two the count and his colleague walked along the lane in silence.

‘Well,
mon ami
,’ the count said at last, ‘you heard all that?’ The other nodded. ‘It puts us,’ the count went on, ‘you know, in a difficult position. Do you think I did right?’

‘I do. You have no choice.’

‘I’m glad you agree. Not a word of this must be known, I need hardly remind you.’

‘You may trust me.’

‘Of course. Now, as we came, let us return, by separate ways.’

Night had come to Albion House and, as she had so often in her young life, Fanny was sitting in the parlour with two old people. In the fireplace the cindery logs produced only an occasional flicker of flame; the candles threw a gentle glow on to the dark oak panelling. Fanny might have ambitious plans for remodelling the house one day into a classical Gothic folly but, for the present, the old parlour had hardly changed since the days of good Queen Bess.